Love. Love when it's easy. Love when it's hard. Love yourself. Love others. In fact, love everyone, all the time, like sun shines and rain falls.Think this is an over simplification? Try it and watch what happens. Sourced in God, your love isn’t personal, but it is powerful. Let your prayers lead you to deeper discoveries of what it means to be the image and likeness of the divine Love that is God. Let Love show you what you are, how extraordinary you are as God’s own ray of love-light. Real love is pure and strong and healthy. You ARE made perfect in love just like your Father-Love. You are built to express love just like your Mother-Love. Why not start there in prayer? The alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of you is love. It is your divine right to see it. You must see it. You can see it. Love.

43 “You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. 44 But I say, love your enemies, Pray for those who persecute you! 45 In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. 46 If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. 47 If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. 48 But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. CHRIST JESUS from MATTHEW 5:43-47 NEW LIVING TRANSLATION

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A blog reader (and patient) who will remain anonymous has been encouraging me to write a post on the importance of loving oneself. A couple of days ago, she wrote me an email explaining how important this concept has been to her in recent days. I asked if she was willing for her thoughts to be shared on the blog. Her reply? "Of course." So here you go!From an email dated Saturday, October 20, 2012:The injunction "Love thy neighbor as thyself" has been popping into my mind for the last few days, and I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. I think most of us would find it not too hard - at least in most cases—to maybe not love, but at least like our neighbor. But us? Love ourselves? Even like ourselves? No way!

Once I asked a dear friend if she loved herself and she looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t even know what that means.” And she was love itself, a church-goer, generous to a fault, devoting all her time to helping others. How could she not know what that meant? I think lots of people would throw up their hands in horror if asked the same question. Yet all through the Bible, the subject is God’s great love for us.

So I was asking myself, what's wrong?In the Bible there is a lot of talk about self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, and selfless love. Also, original sin. And to me, it’s this notion that we are basically sinners and worthless, therefore unworthy of love, that seems to have gotten the upper hand. So the idea of loving oneself has become twisted into being irrelevant or into seeming like an ego trip of self-absorption or self-indulgence, to be rejected entirely by anyone seeking salvation. And then appears the natural extension of this neglecting to love oneself - self-hatred.

I think we have the wrong idea of love and of Love. And it is a better understanding of Love, of God as an unchanging Principle, teaching us to love even ourselves, that makes Christian Science revolutionary.

In Retrospection and Introspection, Mary Baker Eddy writes, “Art thou unacquainted with thyself? Then be introduced to this self. Know thyself!”

Over these past several days when you have been working for me, I have begun to understand that knowing myself has to do with loving myself. That is, to know myself, and love my real self, I must see myself as Love sees me. And “love is patent, love is kind.”

So a healing has come. I can see that because God says I am loved and loveable, it’s being said and done and can’t be contradicted. I can yield, accept. Understanding this has overturned all the bad I’d been told about myself ever since I was little. And the baseless anger that had been eating at me for several months has just dissolved. I have become more patient and kind. I have totally quit bashing myself for anything and everything. And I have decided to love no matter what. Me. Others. Often expressed in just a smile, or even merely a pleasant expression. And in return I’ve had such blessings.

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I have practiced Christian Science professionally insome form since 1979.But my journey withChristian Science startedin a Sunday schoolwhere as a young childI was taught the Scriptures and some simple basicsof Jesus' method ofscientific Christian healing.A significant experienceat the age of twelveopened my eyes tothe great potentialof this practice. After impaling my footon a nail,I prayed the way I had learnedin Sunday school.Within momentsthe pain stoppedand healing began.By the next morning the wound had disappeared completely.Having experiencedthe great potential​of Christian Science,there would be noturning back.